Looking beyond the periphery of traditional CIO role

JAIPUR, INDIA: IT has been to bring in an element of change to the way business think and operate and has impacted the different aspects of the business as well.

The panel discussion,”Customer at the Epicentre: The New Earthquake Inside and Outside Business” explained how the business models have changed drastically over the past couple of years, especially after the arrival of cloud and social media.

IT has always been the backbone for finance and supply chain processes, but marketing is an area, where IT has made significant inroads in recent times. “Social media, Cloud and SaaS have made it easy for marketers to craft the solution,” said Jessi Paul, CEO, Paul Writer. Businesses are walking those extra miles to know the requirements of the customers and map the solutions accordingly.

Hoshie Ghaswalla, CEO, Cybermedia, set the tone of the discussion by touching upon a very relevant piece of CIO conversations today- how important is it for the CIOs to understand the needs of the business and align the IT strategy accordingly. The discussion threw lights on some new and interesting areas where CIOs are increasingly stepping into nowadays.

Asutosh Tiwari, EVP, International Marketing & innovation of Godrej Consumer Products said the business need to be agile enough to know the requirements of customers in different geographies and design solutions accordingly. “Businesses can no longer afford to remain isolated from their customers. They use the social media to connect with their clients, pick up the trends instantaneously and propose the solutions.”

“IT has always been a core function and it has now it has become a part of strategy as well which in turn has made CIO’s role very crucial in the organization,” said Mrityunjay Kumar, head of Enterprise Business, Juniper Networks.”

The expectations from CIOs are huge nowadays and CIOs involvement has been seen in almost each and every area of business.”Â CIOs have so far been on the top of IT in a discrete manner. But optimizing IT is the true challenge that the CIOs are facing nowadays. And the key to future change is how you face those challenges.

“Challenges are daunting, but they also bring new opportunities,” advised Kumar. That will help them to stay ahead of the competition, said he.